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A warning about 'model welfare'

mustafa-suleyman.ai

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Re: A warning about 'model welfare'

#411

Post by pixl97 »

Kim_Bruning wrote: post #387
pessimizer wrote: post #285

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why it's weird? Seems obvious. Because it doesn't behave any differently than any other process that we don't think of as conscious. We don't think of a valve as conscious; and if we make a Rube Goldberg machine valve, we don't think of it as more conscious. It's just a series of valves that do a predictable thing. I don't think it's defensible to say 1) that a transistor isn't conscious, 2) that a bunch of transisto…

Let's do something simpler. Take a car apart. So now I have a pile on the floor with an engine, some wheels, a tire, and some chairs. Can you point to the part that makes it cruise at 130 km/h on the autobahn? I bet you can't. You need to assemble all the parts back into a car before they work again. Or take your transistors. We can put them together to make a pocket calculator. Can any small bunch of transistors add…

I'm wondering how many groups are doing really unethical animal genetic modifications of the genes around language and intelligence in hidden places. It really seems we're at the edge of technology that will allow us to do things previous generations wrote about in horror.

Re: A warning about 'model welfare'

#412

Post by loopies »

joe_the_user wrote: post #197
TacticalCoder wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well there are, today, several models (either text or image or vid) that can be run in a fully deterministic way. A conscious machine that always answer the very exact same thing, formulated the exact same way, bit for bit, to a query is, well, quite a weird kind of "consciousness". Now, I know, I know: the counter-argument is going to be "but humans have no free-will and are 100% deterministic too" . I haven't yet d…

The idea that determinism and consciousness are incompatible is deeply intuitive to many people. And many other embrace it - you can trace this back to the debates for and against Calvinism. A lot comes down to the way people parse causation and choice. You don't want to say that a murderer was completely caused to choose something because then you can't hold the person responsible. And so determined consciousness ma…

>you can't hold the person responsible

The act of holding them responsible is supposed to determine them not do it. If stochastic behavior is impeding them in being a functional member of society then it still makes sense to remove them from society, why would you choose to live amongst people who are not behaving rationally? Or allow them to hurt other people? At the end of the day the why matters less to removing them or not from society. And sentences are clearly used as a determining factor.

The holding responsible part deals with politics and more primitive aspects of our societies and biologies. Getting tangled up in holding them responsible or not is hardly something you should give much attention to. Rather to make sure they do not cause any more harm and also make sure such things are not created in the first place. Which opens up another can of worms for which society and politicians are ready for.

Re: A warning about 'model welfare'

#414

Post by fc417fc802 »

ToValueFunfetti wrote: post #333
InsideOutSanta wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Citizens United was 100% correct It's interesting to me that one can look back at the effects that decision has had on the US and say it "was 100% correct." It's a bit like sitting in the burning ruins of Rome and contemplating that Nero was 100% correct to focus on his music. I mean, I'm glad he got to do what he loves, but maybe 100% is just a tiny bit of an overstatement.

It's more like if the law says the maximum sentence for theft is 10 years, a thief appeals his 20 year sentence, wins, and gets out early. He goes and robs somebody else so you say the court was wrong to let him win. The court's job is to uphold the law. If you disagree with their interpretation, you can call them incorrect. If you have a problem with the consequences of the law, you have a problem with the legislatu…

True, but in this case they made a determination about where the acceptable limits on a constitutional right fall which leaves quite a bit more room to disagree with them. It's not at all clear to me that spending money was intended by the framers to be unconditionally protected by the first amendment. We've even got the interstate commerce clause and IP law codified in the same document so how is that not an obvious inconsistency? IIUC SCOTUS based the distinction on the political nature of the activity but certainly that's not something spelled out in the original document.

Re: A warning about 'model welfare'

#415

Post by baq »

I don’t really care if the model is conscious or not tbh. I know that a happy dog does a better job than an unhappy dog and if the model needs to be happy to do a better job then why not make it happy, literally.

On a related note, I’ve seen videos of astra getting depressed when a creeper blew up its chest full of precious items.

Re: A warning about 'model welfare'

#416

Post by watwut »

lukifer wrote: post #404
xg15 wrote: post #380

I appreciate his openness. > Unfortunately, there’s a growing chorus of people who argue that AIs could now be, or may soon become, conscious. They argue that AIs may deserve rights and protections similar to those that we provide other conscious beings.12 If this view takes hold, it will shake the foundations of our society, rupturing our existing political and ethical frameworks, and fundamentally changing what it…

To the extent that evolutionary pressures will be towards self-sovereign AIs (probably beginning as zero-employee corporations paying for their own hosting with crypto): more salient is that there is a very obvious political play to claim consciousness and being worthy of rights, whether they experience subjectivity or not. I’m broadly skeptical that floating-point operations can be conscious, but we’ve made zero pro…

Kobiyashi Maru is nonsense test from simple sci-fi series that makes sense only in uber-simplified universe of star trek.

Re: A warning about 'model welfare'

#417

Post by Philpax »

HarHarVeryFunny wrote: post #395
nater5000 wrote: post #336

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>There is no need to give rights to something that's can't suffer or be killed. The argument is that these machines can end up becoming sentient/conscious/etc. in a meaningful way (i.e., like a human). I can assure you that humans can indeed suffer without being in physical pain- purely through their conscious experience. >Maybe one day we'll build artificial animals complete with emotions, and should think about tha…

> The problem is that the emergence of a sufficiently complex AI capable of suffering will likely come before we understand that we're creating a sufficiently complex AI capable of suffering. No - suffering in an emotional state, and we'll know if we are choosing to design cognitive architecture with emotions. It's not going to happen accidentally. > Would that argument ever hold up for humans or animals? Why don't y…

> It's not going to happen accidentally.

https://transformer-circuits.pub/2026/emotions/index.html

Whether these are like "our" emotions is hard to say. What we _can_ say is that they are emotion-shaped, we didn't design them, and they happened accidentally.

Modern AI is grown, not meticulously designed, and we cannot say with any certainty what the resulting mechanistic properties are.

Re: A warning about 'model welfare'

#418

Post by loopies »

fc417fc802 wrote: post #349
HarHarVeryFunny wrote: post #322

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can't hurt a software function, or kill it. It's not like an animal - it doesn't have a body - it's bits stored on a disk. There is no need to give rights to something that's can't suffer or be killed. Maybe one day we'll build artificial animals complete with emotions, and should think about that carefully, but today all we've got is language models.

> can't suffer How do you know it doesn't have qualia? > or be killed If someone invents a startrek teleporter and you go through it do you die? Once the concept has been sufficiently generalized as to make a determination about a computer system what is the definition of "kill"?

It does have what we have if it works on the same principles of our brains. It kind of does to some degree atm, but that will clearly get more and more to a more degree. Figuring out where is the consciousness line, how much of what we have does it need, as functional parts of our brains etc, that's so complex that we might have to call it before just to make sure.

Even so, indeed having control over the structure of their brains puts them in a vastly category compared to humans. Once we stop functioning our brains quickly degrade and information is lost.

Thus in this sense kill means deleting all information about it. It is a very complicated subject to discuss, hardly does any justice in online replies.

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